We looked in the Solar System forum, and saw squillions of pics of Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, tiny blindingly bright things, using lucky imaging and video cameras, and felt all alone and cold.
Photographing a very distant comet is more what we do in the deep space section, in that exposures are longer than a tenth of a second.
A single 5 minute exposure*. Aspen CG16M on 20 inch PlaneWave.
The angular diameter of the comet is about 2.4 min arc. We guided on the stars, not the comet nucleus, as it was too faint to guide on.
On the
original image, during that 5 minutes, the core of the comet moved about 11 pixels, or 6 seconds of arc, relative to the stars. At a
distance (according to The Sky Live) of about 232 million km (5 times further than Mars right now, and 40% of the way to Jupiter), that's a guestimated tangential distance of 6820 Km, or a velocity of about 23 Km/sec. It's actual speed, including any radial component, is 36 Km/sec**. Good, but no cigar.
*Earlier I wrote 7 min. That was wrong. We never do 7 minute exposures at home.
** ˇÁndale! ˇÁndale! ˇArriba! ˇArriba!
